Not Marvel Comics, but rather the number four which does have some pretty interesting properties. It’s the only cardinal number in the English language to have the same number of letters as its value; in Buddhism there are four noble truths; in Harry Potter there are four Houses of Hogwarts; humans have four canines and four wisdom teeth; in chemistry there are four basic states of matter… but more importantly, for translators using Studio 2017 there are four ways, out of the box, to get started!
Now with that very tenuous link let’s get to the point. Four ways to start translating, all of them pretty easy but they all have their pros and cons. So getting to grips with this from the start is going to help you decide which is best for you. First of all what are they?
- Translate single document
- Create a project
- Drag and drop your files
- Right-click and “Translate in SDL Trados Studio”
And now we know what they are should you use one process for all, or can you mix and match? I mix and match all the time, mainly between 1. and 2. but let’s look at the differences first and you can make your own mind up.
Everyone knows, I think, that an SDL Trados Studio package (*.sdlppx) is just a zip file containing all the files that are needed to allow you to create your Studio project with all the settings your customer intended. At least it’ll work this way if you use Studio to open the package… quite a few other translation tools these days can open a package and extract the files inside to use but 
… and path handling in Studio can still be a little challenging. I imagine that’s a statement not too many users would disagree with! There is a knack to using it, and if you can allow Studio to do its thing, which is what the black box translation environments of some competitive solutions do anyway, then it is something you can live with. But if you want to have the physical Studio projects set up in the same way as your customer folders, which the black box approach can’t do, then Studio can be a little frustrating at times when in your eagerness to tackle the work your projects are stored in a location you didn’t intend because you missed the prompts to change it! I even wrote about this once in an effort to explain the inner workings of path handling in Studio, “
I think I’ve discussed Project Templates in the past, although perhaps only in passing. So let’s start off by painting a picture of the situation you find yourself in where templates come in handy. You maintain your own Translation Memories, in fact you have five you regularly use for every project but keep them separate because they are based on different sublanguages and you have some clients who adhere strictly to the minor linguistic differences. You have a couple of termbases that you also like to add to every project and you find it easier to manage the terminology for your clients in separate termbases rather than use custom fields that complicate the ability to import/export with your colleagues. You also have very specific quality assurance rules that you’ve honed over many years of translating and you know these are reliable and help you when you work.
A couple of years ago I wrote an article on the SDL blog explaining the differences between Project Settings and Global Settings. Things have changed a little now, although the principle is the same, and Studio 2014 has a different interface so I thought, given the number of times this still comes up, that I’d refresh the article a little and have another go at making this clear. If you are still using Studio 2009/2011 then the original article might still be helpful – 